The real news this month is that Possessions is Beta’ing, and the impacts that it will have on the wiki. I also want to apologize for the lateness of this report, late October/early November has been a busy time for me on the Real Life front as the Speech & Debate teams I coach for try to drive me bonkers with too many tournaments. December’s report should be, once again, right on time!

Y’all Own Stuff!

So, now that we’re all good little capitalist consumers (or at least the beta version of them, anyway), the Brotherhood is going to have a more structured management of what your characters all “own” moving forward. The wiki, as a result, is going to be moving to align itself with that system. You might have seen the various tags on certain articles noting that they will be impacted by possessions, and now that day is basically here. I’m going to be working on ironing out a specific policy document for reference use. I’ve never been a fan of unwritten rules, so I’m going to make sure to write these down on the wiki once they’re less concept and more crystallized. The short version/guiding principle, however, will be this: if there’s an article (or independent section of an article) about it, it has to be an officially possessed item. What an article is seems fairly self explanatory. What I mean by a section of an article would be this. Basically, if you just make a throw away reference to an item in an article, that’s fine and shouldn’t cause you any trouble. Of course, there will be exceptions (if you make a throw away reference to owning an Executor-class star dreadnought in your article, for example), but for the most part we won’t be coming down on that stuff much if at all.

I know there are probably people out there making frowny faces at me, as the wiki has always been a bit of the wild west when it comes to things your character owns in the past. In fictions, a person is free to make use of the Possessions Systems (I’m sure it will be highly encouraged) or not, so why should the wiki be any different? I’m glad you asked, voice in my head. Simply put, what you do in your fictions is between you, the grader, and the wall. The wiki, on the other hand, is something that is a collective DJB system that everyone uses. Possessions doesn’t work if people are free to ignore it on the wiki (and everywhere outside of the ACC, really). Why worry about saving up to purchase a ship in the Possessions System if you can simply create a wiki article about whatever ship you want? With the amount of work going into Possessions by the Schenashal, Regent, Voice, and Herald, I’ve made the decision that the wiki is going to do everything it can to support that system.

As part of the wiki’s Possession System support, I’ve also asked James to set up some new external links for the new toys that will function much like the current [[dossier:]] link. These new external links are [[item:]] and [[itemprototype:]]. Every item and item prototype in Possessions has an id number in the URL much like our dossier pins. For a ship, this ship has the id number 2769, so the link [[item:2769]] in a wiki article would then lead to the item page on the DJB wesbite. If you were linking to the item prototype version of the J-type 327 Nubian Starship, it would be [[item:524]]. An item field has been included in the infobox templates for droids, military units, ships, space stations, vehicles, and weapons.

Clan Possessions

Possessions isn’t just impacting individual members, it is also changing how we manage Clan possessions. For years the wiki has been the front-facing element of Clan fleets and armies, with the Military Possessions Record being the master list of what everyone owns. Possessions, however, has stolen that particular thunder and moved that management to the main Brotherhood website and relegated the list of items to the Past Military Possessions Record and the obsolete data category. This is actually good in a lot of ways, since the MPR was often out of date as well as being a little hard to find if you didn’t know what you were looking for.

What does this mean, though, for Clans and their wiki teams? The MPR system did have a lot of spillover into wiki pages, with many Clans creating pages for ships, starfighters, vehicles, and military units. Two of those will remain unaffected, as the wiki will support Clan articles for starships and military units moving forward. What is, however, getting the axe are the various starfighter and vehicle articles that pepper the wiki. A good example is the B-51 B-wing - Dark Council article. Most clans had similarly formatted articles for both the starfighters/support ships and ground vehicles they owned to provide an article showing that they owned a certain number of those units. Across all the Clans and even the Dark Council, the content within these articles is almost exclusively transcluded specificiations from the specs transclusion category. These articles are functionally being replaced by items in the possessions system, and therefore all of them (including the specs transclusions) are going to be heading to the trash bin in the very near future. Members of my staff are working with all the Clans to make sure we salvage any of the unique information that might be contained within these articles for use moving forward.

With that in mind, the wiki will still allow for Clans to create content for starfighters, but that content will be moving more towards the unit side of things (following along with the Wookieepeida model). What that means is that your Clan won’t have a B-51 B-wing article, but it might have an article about a squadron of B-wings such as Terminus Squadron. If your Clan doesn’t create articles for each individual squadron that it owns, it may opt to create a master article for their overall starfighter unit much like the Arcona Starfighter Corps. The same holds true for vehicle specifications articles being replaced with unit articles, such as the Army Force Rancor article.

The underview/TL;DR here is that the Possessions System is going to be taking over the asset tracking for Clans, so the wiki is going to get back to focusing specifically on the lore.

Featured Articles & Wikipedian of the Month

This month’s featured article is one created by a member of my staff, so it’d better be good! The Bentre Stahoes article is a good example of an article that reflects the new timeline and has updated to include current Brotherhood events. I know a lot of people have struggled to craft articles for the new timeline given how much of the time between RotJ and TFA is ill defined. In the past, galaxy spanning conflicts such as the Vong War have been reflected in everyone’s background because they’ve had to, and the lack of those major touchstones can leave a person feeling a bit lost. This article is a great model to use for people looking to get their sea legs so to speak. It blends general Star Wars elements while focusing on a character’s specific experiences, all without requiring the name dropping of major galactic events. It illustrates the freedom of character development that I, at least personally, have come to see as a freeing of constraints as we no longer have to write ourselves around major, tectonic shifts happening in the galaxy our characters inhabit.

As for our Wikipedian of the Month, this month that title goes to Marick Tyris, newly appointed loud-talkey guy of the Brotherhood. Ever since he took the job of Voice, Marick has been all over the Voice office’s footprint on the wiki. He’s updated, created, and generally been a content generating machine. He’s doing the work so you can have all the information you might ever need right at your fingertips.

Final Words

Monthly Reminder: The wiki staff as a whole is always here to give you a hand with wiki questions. Hit us up on telegram (many of us are on there often/always/too much), and even if the staffer you catch doesn’t know the answer they’ll track me down and make sure you get an answer. We’re there to help you guys out, so don’t hesitate!